Oculus on PlayStation 4? It's Not That Crazy

So far, the virtual reality headset—which went from a $2 million Kickstarter to a $2 billion Facebook acquisition in less than two years—only works with PCs. But it's not impossible for Rift to work with game consoles, an Oculus exec said this week, noting that Oculus had talked to Sony and Microsoft about it.

The fact that Oculus has talked to Sony and Microsoft means little on its own because everybody is always talking to everybody; for every deal that gets done, a hundred more never get past an initial lunch meeting. But the idea that Oculus might hook up to game consoles isn't just a pipe dream, and it would be a huge win for both parties.

You may find this contradictory, but it seems to me that the platform with the biggest chance of supporting Oculus is actually the one that already has its own first-party VR hardware—PlayStation 4.

Sony's public position on Oculus has always been that it doesn't see Oculus as competition, but as something of an ally in the larger battle of making virtual reality an actual reality. You see stuff like this a lot:

That's Shuhei Yoshida, head of Sony's worldwide game development studios, the face of Sony's Project Morpheus VR headset, taking a selfie with Oculus' CEO after having just done a behind-closed-doors demo of the latest Rift headset.

Besides the general chumminess of the two companies, the fact is that there isn't a whole lot of difference between Morpheus and Rift. Both use cameras for head tracking. Oculus Rift games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes are being announced for Morpheus, too.

But why would Sony allow Oculus to plug in to PS4 when it's making Morpheus? Because its goal is not to sell Morpheus headsets, it is to get as many people as possible into its VR customer base.

Hardware is expensive. VR hardware is very expensive. And asking your customer base to purchase a hardware add-on to enable new software is typically a very difficult proposition. Developers end up having to make a difficult choice—do we produce games for the small percentage of PlayStation 4 owners who have a Morpheus, or do we skip it and just make games that can be purchased by every PS4 owner?

If the consumer versions of Rift and Morpheus do end up being fairly close to one another in terms of features, and the only differences between them end up being slight differences in framerate or which one looks cooler when strapped to your head, then it makes all the sense in the world for Sony to support Oculus on PS4. It would drastically increase the addressable market, it might convince Oculus early adopters to buy a PS4, and it takes the pressure off of Sony to produce so many Morpheus headsets—it can be a little conservative about how many of the very expensive things it makes, knowing Oculus could help pick up the slack.

PS4 owners who are on the fence about virtual reality could just buy an Oculus instead of Morpheus, knowing that they're not buying an expensive piece of hardware that's only tied to one particular platform.

And quite frankly, if virtual reality takes off, we'll all only want one single VR headset anyway, just like we wouldn't buy separate televisions for our Xbox One and PS4.

And what of Xbox One? This is a little murkier for two reasons: Microsoft hasn't announced any initiative to bring virtual reality to its console as Sony has, and it's also announced HoloLens, an augmented-reality headset. It's hard to read what, if anything, Microsoft wants to do with immersive virtual reality. Maybe it does plan to simply support Oculus on Xbox One. But maybe it's going to avoid full immersion altogether so it can just push its so-called "holographic" games instead.

But plugging an Oculus into your PlayStation? That day could be closer than you think.